Parrot, Cfengine, OpenBSD's PF, XMMS, and MySQL

Hello, readers, and welcome to the Linux newsletter, a weekly report of
new articles relating to open source and Linux development, deployment, and
discussion, as seen on ONLamp.com. Here are the new articles this week:

Parrot lead designer (and Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials, 2nd Edition
coauthor) Dan Sugalski has contributed Building
a Parrot Compiler. Suppose you already know that Parrot is the virtual
machine intended to run Perl 6. Did you also know it will (or in some cases
does already) run Ruby, Python, Tcl, BASIC, or almost any other language you
can imagine? You might not want to port a big language to Parrot right now,
but what about a domain-specific language? Dan's saved his company much time
and trouble by building a Parrot compiler for an aging, unsupported 4GL.
Perhaps it's time for you to dust off that Dragon book and see if Parrot is
right for your project.

If you're more of an adminstrator than a programming geek, you may be more
interested in making multiple computers work together than in making multiple
languages work together. Luke Kanies knows this feeling. His new article
series, starting with this week's Introducing
Cfengine, explains how to use Cfengine to describe the state in
which you want your system or systems. Cfengine will perform the actions
necessary to achieve that state. That sounds a little abstract—but think of it as a way to automate your administrative duties by describing
the end results, not the steps along the way.

OpenBSD 3.5 will release in a couple of weeks. Federico Biancuzzi has
taken advantage of the timing to interview some of the hardest working
developers anywhere. His OpenBSD
PF Developer Interview, Part 1 explores the beginning of the packet
filtering project through the current features and goals. This is an
opinionated, detailed, and often fascinating look at one of the most
innovative projects in open source today. Stay tuned for the second half of
the interview in a few weeks.

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If you prefer your innovation in making your current, day-to-day tasks
easier (and if your daily tasks don't involve knowing much about TCP headers),
Rickford Grant's Getting
the Most Out of XMMS presents ten handy tips to improve the behavior,
performance, and experience of playing music on the de facto music player in
the Linux world. (You might know Rickford as the author of Linux for
Non-Geeks, a book which your editor hopes will finally appeal to his
parents.)

Editor Andy Oram's report from the MySQL Conference, per usual
with the insightful Andy, is more an article than a weblog. Why MySQL Grew So Fast explores the
ideas of a distruptive, good-enough technology that keeps improving, baffling
critics and naysayers. There are also some interesting thoughts on the stages
of commercial adoption. What do Apple, Sun, HP, and Novell have in common?
They're all at least two steps into switching to open source.

If Perl powers part of your LAMP, Larry Wall's Apocalypse 12 is out.
Besides far more than you ever thought you might possibly want to know about
how objects and classes will work in Perl 6, Larry's usual humor and
thoughtfulness peppers this 20-page "doctoral thesis". (Your editor
particularly recommends the section on Roles.)

ONLamp.com and Linux Devcenter Top Five Articles Last Week

Linux on the GameCube
As consoles grow in power and digital convergence looms, they become
fever more attractive targets for free operating systems. What better
hack than to port Linux or BSD to the GameCube? Howard Wen interviews
the developers behind GameCube Linux.

Linux on the PS2
As consoles increase in power and alternate operating systems
increase in functionality and flexibility, it's ever more attractive
to port your favorite free operating system. In the case of Sony's
PlayStation 2, the company even encourages it. John Littler explores
Linux on the PS2, including hardware, installation, upgrades,
alternatives, and game programming.

OSDL's Carrier-Grade Linux
As Linux grows and matures, it moves into more and more applications
and markets. A recent initiative from the Open Source Development
Lab brings together telecommunications companies to build
carrier-grade features into Linux. Ibrahim Haddad examines what
that means, what progress the CGL team has made, and what plans
they have yet to achieve.

Eleven Metrics to Monitor for a Happy and Healthy Squid
Duane Wessels offers 11 tips to help you stay on top of Squid's
performance. If you follow this advice, you should be able to
discover problems before your users begin calling you to complain.
Duane is the creator of Squid and the author of Squid: The
Definitive Guide.